How To Think Politically - Graeme Garrard - #107

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Oh yes, hello friends. welcome back to Modern Wisdom. As you may be able to hear, I am suffering the depths of freshers flu right now. After 13 freshers, it's not got any easier to deal with, I'm afraid, but the show goes on and the guests keep on coming. We've had a number of episodes recently that have been to do with history or politics, and the theme continues today with Graeme Garrard talking about How To Think Politically, his new book, which I have to say, as someone who isn't that bothered about history or politics, I found really interesting. So yeah, today we get to learn about the history of politics, where it came from, why it's needed, and we get to talk about some really interesting writers and thinkers over the years, Aristotle, Karl Marx, Machiavelli, Plato, Socrates, Nietzsche. So yeah, if you've heard of these names, but you haven't got a clue what they're about, then you're gonna get to find out the cliff notes of them today. Also, massive thank you to everyone who has been liking and sharing the podcast over the last few weeks. We are closing in very rapidly on 1 million downloads, which is gonna be very exciting. We've got some awesome episodes coming up. Lifehacks 110, Christoph popping in to talk about mental health and what it's like being a world famous DJ touring all around the globe. So yeah, we got some big ones coming in, but for now, please welcome Graeme Garrard. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. I'm joined by Graeme Garrard, and we're gonna learn how to think politically today, right, that's correct?

**Graeme Garrard** (1:44)
Yes, indeed, yes.

**Chris Williamson** (1:45)
welcome to the show, how are you today?

**Graeme Garrard** (1:46)
Thank you very much, yes, glad to be here.

**Chris Williamson** (1:48)
Yeah, it's gonna be interesting. We've been delving into politics and history a little bit recently on the show, so the listeners should be in the mood for it, at least appetites will have been wet. So to begin the discussion, in its purest form, what is politics and why do we need it?

**Graeme Garrard** (2:07)
Well, politics is a way of managing human societies that uses argument, debate, rhetoric, persuasion, but doesn't resort to use of force. It's uniquely a human thing because we have language.
When shooting breaks out, then politics ends and you have war. Not everyone accepts that view, though there are lots of different conceptions of what politics is, but really, generally, that's what it is. Some of your viewers may be familiar with a quotation that's often used by a theorist of war, a German theorist of war named Klauswitz, who said that war is just politics by other means. So that's a view of politics that I'm rejecting. My view is that when war begins, politics ends. It's not always clear where the boundary is between the two, but that's a view of politics that I have. So politics is obviously important if you want to resolve differences in a way that doesn't resort to force. So all human societies involve some element of agreement and some element of disagreement. If you didn't agree on anything, you wouldn't have a political community at all to start with, right? But if you agreed on everything, you wouldn't need politics. So politics lies somewhere between those two extremes. People agree and disagree. And so politics is really about how you manage those disagreements. So it takes all kinds of different forms. So the one we're most familiar with is democracy. Although even that takes different forms. But there are other forms of politics that aren't democratic. Indeed, most of human history has been characterized by forms of politics that are not democratic. In fact, the greatest democracy of them all perhaps was ancient Athens. And then for almost 2500 years, there really wasn't any democracy to speak of. Then it was reborn in 18th century, 19th century. And now it's the dominant form in large parts of the world. But, you know, there are other forms. So in the particular form of democracy that we know best in the West, in the modern West, we have institutions that we use to manage society, to allow us to cooperate, to pursue our common ends, but also allow us to manage conflict and difference when we disagree, so that we're not killing each other. But you know, there are other forms as well. So you know, there's authoritarian forms of politics and aristocratic forms, et cetera, et cetera. But in the general terms, as I said, it's really about managing societies in a way that avoids actual violence.

**Chris Williamson** (5:18)
I can't remember the first person who I heard said it, but the comment that you made about you've got discussion and you've got conflict, you have words and you have fighting, words and fists, I suppose. Those are really the only two ways that we can communicate with each other, right? It's either by talking about something, and then when that doesn't happen, it goes into fighting about something. There's not really many of the mechanisms that we have to play with.